(This is how online journals—blogs, how I hate that name—came to be. At least from my perspective.)
Once upon a time, I was a revolutionary.
I was 14, 16, 18 years old. I was angrily, gloriously, openly mentally ill. I was—always— in love.
I was too young to know what I was doing, too young to know better. Too young to understand what it meant to live your life out loud, to welcome all criticism. I was too young to realize how big a risk I was taking, and now. . . now I am too old to learn how to do anything else.
We wrote like town criers, the purpose of our existence to scribble out these self-involved diatribes. Even rants were nothing more than tributaries always streaming, in a torrent, back to our favorite subject:
us. We would carelessly disregard all criticism, furthermore, and relentlessly silence all critics by nothing more than pure force of personality.
We wrote in that area of gray that lies before shame but after self-consciousness.
I was angrily, openly, gloriously mentally ill; I had no remorse. The finer, subtler feelings of quiet self-doubt that fells Hamlet or Ophelia had no effect on me—I was too busy fighting demons to have the internal luxury of quiet self-doubt.
I could not take the time to do more than hate myself in the broadest sense, for any subtle rationale for the hatred could have been dealt with and self-hatred was all I believed I had left. The surest route to true self-hatred is always tautology: I am bad, therefore I hate myself, I hate myself, therefore I am bad. And because it was a tautology, it could not stand up to reasoned, measured thinking and so I never did
that.
And so therefore I had no remorse, because if you can never spare a moment to doubt your actions—if you are so busy committing crimes, that, much like a Wall Street stockbroker, you never have time to serve for them— then you are never sorry for the wrongs you've committed.
And there in that land, that gray aisle after shame but before remorse, I survived, knife between my teeth and fingers curled as claws.
I was always in love. Whether it was with another or with the pure heady feeling of that love that
needs no name: self-love, self-
obsession, really, and for which self-hatred is just another side of the same coin.
I had passion—inevitably, inexorably, the black hole of my thoughts. An overwhelming object which consumed my smallest thoughts. All roads lead to Rome, and I needed no proof of the axiom,
was the axiom: even the most infinitesmal flittering of my brain revolved around the object of my love/hate.
After remorse, but before forgiveness, I wrote to exorcise my demonic passion.
I wrote about
everything—my self-doubt, my self-hatred, my life, my most mundane thoughts—with the myopic eye of a biographer. A detective, searching for clues—why? Why was I this way? I was a frantic housewife, cleaning to scrub up before company, the most pungent self-evaluations shoved under couches, sheafs of paper littered with diatribe raining down when you opened the closet doors.
And then I published it all—all my angry analysis, my arrogant apathy, my abusive autobiography.
Now it's all different. Now, when someone says they met their SO on the internet, you look mildly bored and ask "OKCupid or Jdate?" instead of saying
but they could have been an axe murderer!Now, we are a nation of self-aggrandizing blowhards, whales spouting into the air with the splash gone again 20 seconds later when the next Facebook update appears.
Soundbites have gone from being 45 seconds to 8, and attention spans have gone with them. Nobody reads my archives anymore—besides, they're private now. I said some things that I shouldn't have.
I said a
lot of things I shouldn't have.
But, once upon a time, I was a revolutionary.
Once upon a time, I was a writer.
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